May you live in interesting times...

Matt Yglesias posted on the voting trends of younger people.  I wrote  a comment that I decided to repost here.

Voting trends are just that - trends. Trends can turn on a dime - just like the varying popularity of kitten heels, flats, and platforms. At least such is the case during times of relative prosperity.  Prosperity breeds complacency.  It is during such uninteresting times that we sow the seeds of our on destruction.

As someone in the latter half of their forties - I came of age during the Reagan era. Spin and the mere fact that not much "bad" happened during the 80s and 90s to derail the American dream led to a quantum shift towards the conservative. The youth of our day will hopefully learn from our mistakes - because they are certainly paying for them. (And for that - all I can offer is a humble apology across the generational divide. )

What the youth of our day didn't have was a proper sense of history. Our parents before us remembered all too well the manipulation and greed that led to the Great Depression. They were children, but grinding poverty leaves its mark. To us, it was just a blip. Ancient history...it could never happen again. Tearing massive holes in regulatory agencies, turning them into toothless dogs seemed like a fine idea to us because it kept the tax burden light. Creating a safety net that leaked like a sieve didn't worry us either. After all, WE controlled our destiny...or so we thought.

What we didn't understand was that that "control" was built on a firm foundation of regulatory control and strong social safety net that caught us if we stumbled or the economy teetered. What we didn't "get" was that without those firm underpinnings we were chum to be eaten by a few sharks. Those sharks had been caged so long that we didn't realize that they were waiting for their opportunity.  We voted in the robber baron economy with nary a thought of its implications.

Sadly - prosperity breeds apathy - it took 25-30 years of relative prosperity for the consequences to take hold. It's only in the turmoil that the public arises from its stupor. Now awakened - the question is whether the youth of America will repeat our mistakes and walk into the future with eyes wide shut - believing in the simplistic bromides offered by the Palins and Becks of the world. Or will the undercurrent of poverty, turmoil, and greed lead them to realize what my Grandparents came to know? Free markets are not truly "free" unless anarchy is your idea of free. After all, oligarchy only works if you are an oligarch.

The paradoxical curse "May you live in interesting times" implies that interesting times do not result in prosperity and are generally punctuated by upheaval.  However, it is just that environment that tends to rouse the populace from its complacent stupor by forcing us to become keenly aware of the world around us.  Let us hope this is the case with the youth of today.

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